Polish
composer Krzysztof Penderecki are among the five winners of this year's
Praemium Imperiale, one of the richest prizes in the arts world.
The other winners of the Japan Art Association's prestigious award are
Brazilian architect Oscar Niemer, German painter Georg Baselitz, American
sculptor Bruce Nauman and Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami.

The
artists will each receive 15 million yen ($194,000) - believed to the highest
monetary prize purely for artists - a diploma and medal at a ceremony in
Tokyo scheduled for October 21, the association said.

Krzysztof
Penderecki was born in Debica on 23 November, 1933. He studied composition
privately with Franciszek Skolyszewsk and then (1955-8) with Artur Malawski
and Stanis?aw Wiechowicz at the State Higher School of Music in Kraków,
where he also taught, being appointed its rector (i.e., president) in 1972
(in the 1980s the School was renamed "Academy of Music). Penderecki's career
had a very auspicious beginning. In 1959 he came suddenly to prominence
when three of his works won first prizes in a national competition organized
by the Polish Composers' Union (he submitted them under different pseudonyms).
His reputation quickly spread abroad, notably through perfomances of such
works as Anaklasis (written for the 1960 Donaueschigen Festival) and Threnody
for the Victims of Hiroshima. The latter piece, as well as the Passion
according to St. Luke of 1963-5, found an unusually wide audience for contemporary
works, and Penderecki soon received important commissions from diverse
organizations in Europe and the USA. He has also appeared widely as a lecturer
and in 1972 began to conduct his own compositions.

Penderecki
has won numerous domestic and foreign prizes including the First Class
State Award (1968, 1983), the Polish Composers' Union Prize (1970), the
Herder Prize (1977), the Sibelius Prize (1983), the Premio Lorenzo Magnifico
(1985), the Israeli Karl Wolff Foundation Prize (1987), a Grammy Award
(1988), a Grawemeyer Award (1992), and a UNESCO International Music Council
Award (1993).

Penderecki's
teaching career developed in Germany, the U.S. and Poland. He taught composition
at the Volkwang Hochschule fur Music, Essen (from 1966 to 1968); in 1973-78
he lectured at Yale University in New Haven. In 1982-87 he was rector of
the Academy of Music in Kraków, in 1987-1990 he served as the artistic
director of the Cracow Philharmonic. Since his conductor's debut with the
London Symphony Orchestra (1973), he has performed with prominent symphony
orchestras in the United States and Europe, and he is chief guest conductor
of the Norddeutscher Rundfunk Orchestra in Hamburg. Apart from his own
works, his conducting repertoire covers the works of composers from various
epochs, with a preference for 19th-century and early 20th-century compositions.
In 1997 he published a book entitled "The Labyrinth of Time. Five Lectures
at the End of the Century (Warsaw, "Presspublica"). In 1996 the performance
of his piece Seven Gates of Jerusalem, commissioned by the city, commemorated
the celebrations of "Jerusalem - 3000 Years." in Israel.

The
best known composition by Penderecki is his St. Luke Passion, the Passio
et mors domini nostri Jesu Christi secundum Lucam, completed in 1965.

Adams
Wins Inaugural Northwestern Prize "The Pulitzer Prize-winning American
composer John Adams is the first recipient of Northwestern University's
Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Musical Composition. The biennial award
carries a cash award of $100,000 and honors living composers of widely
recognized achievement. It is one of the largest in classical music." Chicago
Tribune 06/02/04

Pulitzer
Music Changes Debated Changes in the criteria for the Pulitzer Prize
for music to broaden it are provoking controversy. Defenders say: "The
board has been concerned for many years that the full range of exellence
in American music was not somehow getting through the process in such a
way that it could be properly and appropriately considered. The changes
in the wording are intended to make sure that the full range of excellence
can be considered. The prize should not be reserved essentially for music
that comes out of the European classical tradition." Boston Globe 06/01/04

New
Opera, New Tryout "Even though the operagoing public today seems more
open to new works than it has in decades, the repertory in most houses
remains overwhelmingly traditional. Major commissions are rare. So even
composers with no prior experience are under pressure to come up with an
effective work right off the bat." That's why New York City Opera's annual
showcase for new operas "provides composers and librettists with an invaluable
chance to assess how a work might come across." The New York Times 06/06/04

The
Ring Tone Charts A new music chart will track the popularity of phone
ring tones. An estimated £70m of ringtones were sold in 2003 - up
from £40m in 2002. The fortnightly chart will count down the 20 most
popular tones downloaded onto mobile phones and will be published in Music
Week magazine. Most current pop hits are available to buy as mobile phone
rings for between £1.50 and £3.50." BBC 06/01/04

Boston
Pops' American Idol Hundreds of hopeful singers lined up Thursday to
audition for a chance to sing with the Boston Pops. "In its own version
of "American Idol," the orchestra is holding open auditions Thursday and
Friday to find a vocalist who will sing in front of 500,000 people expected
at the Hatch Shell on the Charles River. The only requirements are that
applicants be over 18 and not have agents or recording contracts." The
New York Times 06/04/04

Testing
The Mobile Music Companion A concert-goer takes a spin with a hand-held
electronic Concert Companion at a New York Philharmonic concert. "It was
amazing, in fact: to my untrained eye and ear, the text invariably arrived
at exactly the right moment. And there was something exciting, or at least
satisfying, about reading that the concertmaster traditionally plays the
solo and glancing up to see said concertmaster sawing away." And yet, there
were some problems... The New York Times 06/06/04

Chinese
Pianist Wins E-Competition "Jie Chen, an 18-year-old pianist from China
who moved to the United States with her mother five years ago, won first
prize in the second biennial International Piano-e-Competition in Minneapolis.
She received $25,000 and a Yamaha Disklavier (an electronic keyboard) valued
at $75,000, along with a recital at Alice Tully Hall in New York and a
CD on the Ten Thousands Lakes label. Pianists from 12 countries, from 15
to 31 years old, competed." The Star-Tribune (Mpls) 06/06/04

Record
companies, artists and publicists are invited to submit CDs to be considered
for our Editor's Pick's of the month. Send to: Jerry Bowles, Editor,
Sequenza 21, 340 W. 57th Street, 12B, New York, NY 10019

Ned
Rorem Song Competition

Nuvovok
is looking for submissions of new, unpublished songs for the Ned Rorem
Award for Song Composition. Each entry must be a setting for voice
and piano of one of the following texts, selected by Rorem:

Questions
about the competition or the conference may be directed to diana.barnhart
@ verizon.net, go to www.nuvovox.com, or
call (215) 886-0606 and leave a fax number (when possible) and phone number.

Contemporary
Music: How Do We Know What to Make of It?

By
Duane Harper Grant

Iterations
of an interesting question have been milling around in my head for a quite
a while and it is my belief that I am not the only one that has pondered
this question at one time or another. It¹s a question that has no
real or set answer and therefore is open-ended, full of diversions and
theories that can relate directly or indirectly to many theories about
music, art and human behavior.

The
question, or at least one simple way of putting it, is: how do we know
if new music, contemporary music, art music of the 2oth and now the 21st
century, (what ever we shall call the genre at any given time) is, well,
good or bad or of any relevance to our personal and collective sensibilities?
In other words, how do we translate what we are listening to into language
that we can understand and inform ourselves of how we relate and respond
to a musical piece. I know that the terms good and bad are simplistic and
don¹t begin to tell the whole story of an experience we might have
with music that we are hearing or have heard but for a point of reference
they are terms that are basic ideas of our response. The first thing that
our unconscious wants to know is if we like or dislike the experience that
we are having. There are things far beyond like and dislike that are very
much a part of our conscious and unconscious experience and dialogue that
are very important too.

Granted,
the question and arguments are in a large part intellectual and vast. I
asked a friend and colleague this question and told him that I was thinking
of writing about it. He said it sounded like quite a large and complex
subject and could easily be the subject of a doctoral dissertation but
it started an interesting dialogue between us. Still this question about
art music (as opposed to pop) and the implications of a relationship with
new thought and ideas are as much tempting as they are perplexing.

Some
implied questions here are; can we make cohesive sense out of the overall
state of contemporary art music? Do we need to? If so, how do we and what
are the major pitfalls in attempting this? Why would we want to do such
a thing in the first place? Perhaps taking stock of the state of the art
is useful, just as knowing trends in thought are, but another interesting
underlying question is why are so many people not able to relate to this
music at best and at worse are categorically dismissing it? In this question
we seem to be asking about the effect, and result but the why question,
the cause, is more illusive.

Over
a period of time one thing that started to come into focus for me in reading
the literature, documentation and CD notes about music written say within
the last 40-50 years or so is that the conceptual language of contemporary
art music; the language that composers, critics and listeners use to design
and describe the music, has grown and changed astoundingly. The lexicon
of musical concept, and practice; the way we describe music is ever pushing
the limits and now seems as vast as individual and collective imagination.
Even if one is paying close attention it is very difficult to stay up on
it.

Another
area, that we also have to consider firstly, is the practical and conceptual
language that we have, or had, grown accustomed to that we now find, that
we are in fact, not finding as much. In the world of contemporary music
much of the familiar trappings are sometimes all but disappeared and in
their place are often more unfamiliar elements. Take the most basic and
simple of concepts; melody. Melody is an idea ingrained in our psyches.
Of all the elements of music it is the one most of us consciously or unconsciously
gravitate toward first. In western culture we have listened to and grown
familiar with the melodies of a vast body of work spanning a wide spectrum
of period and style starting with ancient Gregorian chants and early polyphonic
singing. In looking at the whole of musical lineage and practice, the importance
of melody to composers and listeners is a serious consideration. So what
then happens when a era comes along in which the concept of melody is morphed?
When the nice diatonic tunes which our ears have been trained to pick up
on become atonal, or when melody becomes a faint cipher, or when (as we
have known it) it is virtually nonexistent in a piece? How does one relate
to and make sense of something so different and new. In careful study of
this question one would have to at least admit that the answer is: maybe
not so easily.

Shall
we therefore, by extension, grant the other prime tenets of music; those
of tonality, (which is an extension or the result of melody and harmony
especially as it relates keys both major and minor), and harmony and rhythm,
the same specification, as far as their having a changing presence and
role in music, as we have to melody. Interestingly, the element of rhythm
is often even the most strikingly changed idea and devise of musical composition
and practice of all.

Call
it Angèle meets the devil. Call it crossover. But resistance
is futile. Angèle
Dubeau is a remarkable violinist, and here, she and her all-woman, 12-strong
group, La Pieta, tackle some of the showiest virtuoso pieces composed or
transposed for solo violin and strings, in various combinations, and with
an occasional piano thrown in. From Saint-Saens' Danse Macabre to
the Jagger/Richards masterpiece Paint It Black, these ladies play these
violin bon bons with a warmth and flair that would warm the devil’s heart.
A bonus DVD reveals the players to be as comely as they are talented.

Gramophone
made this its top pick of the month and it's easy to understand why.
The young Canadian soprano Karina Gauvin delivers a drop-dead gorgeous
reading of Barber's magical setting of a James Agee poem. Marin Alsop
is also excellent in the two Essays for orchestra, works written for
Bruno Walter and Eugene Ormandy, respectively.

Two
well-known masterpieces by Dmitri Shostakovich are paired to fine
effect with a less well-known ‘Russian’ work by Aaron Copland. Copland’s
infrequently heard Vitebsk Trio of 1929 is an early work, based on a Jewish
theme the composer heard at a performance of Dybbuk, a play by Shalom Ansky
(who was born in the town of Vitebsk). The work combines elements of the
neoclassicism and folk style of Stravinsky with experiments in polytonality
and microtones. Brilliantly performed by Trio Wanderer.

First
released on Nonesuch in 1989, this all-world-premiere title, which
did much to bring Rouse’s immense talent to a wider public, boasts 24-bit
newly remastered sound and the complete and lively interview with the composer
conducted by Glenn Watkins. Conductor David Zinman’s close collaboration
with Rouse ensured that the introspective Symphony No. 1 (with its references
to Bruckner and Shostakovich) and the highly surreal Phantasmata triptych
received maximum voice.

Philip
Glass’ Tirol Concerto for Piano and Orchestra was commissioned by the Tyrol,
Austria Tourist Board and had its world premiere at the Tyrol Festival
“Klangspuren” in Jenbach, in 2000. While staying in Tyrol, Glass
studied sound documents and sheet music of Tyrolese folk-music. In
his Tirol Concerto, played here by conductor/pianist Dennis Russell Davies
and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, This disc also features selections
from Passages, Glass's collaboration with Indian Sitar master Ravi Shankar,
as arranged by Davies.

Olga
Kern was awarded the Gold Medal at the Eleventh Van Cliburn International
Piano Competition in 2001 - the first woman to garner that honor in over
thirty years. On her new release Olga Kern performs a dazzling program
of Rachmaninov’s piano transcriptions of of music by Bach, Bizet, Kreisler,
Mendelssohn, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Schubert and Tchaikovsky, his
Corelli Variations, and the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 — with Rachmaninov’s
own cadenza, transcribed from his recordings.

Sir
William Walton's Belshazzar's Feast, composed in 1930-31, is the
finest British choral work since Elgar's Dream of Gerontius, although it
is far more "modern." Scored for baritone, choir and orchestra Belshazzar
is a compact work lasting just under 45 minutes. It recounts the Biblical
story of the downfall of the proud Belshazzar, King of Babylon whose doom
is foretold by a ghostly hand writing the chilling prophecy on the wall
during a banquet. Walton's dazzling and often times startling music is
gripping from the first bar to the last.

American
composer Thomas Pasatieri created this powerful song cycle, setting six
texts by poet/cabaret artist Pola Braun, who wrote these texts while in
the Warsaw Ghetto and in the Majdanek concentration camp, where she perished
in 1943. The poems bear poignant, painful witness to the disruption,
forced disintegration and, finally, destruction of daily life of every
Jew in Poland in World War II. Pasatieri is best known for his many
film orchestrations including Road to Perdition, Finding Nemo, and Angels
in America. Here, he takes full advantage of Jane Eaglen's
glorious voice and his orchestrations reveal a composer of considerable
depth.

18-year-old
Armenian wunderkind tosses off the Sibelius with a dazzling display of
sheer virtuosity and delivers a much deeper, more sober reading of his
fellow countryman's bouncy masterpiece than we are accustomed to
hearing. Eye-opening performance and a performer to watch.

Re-issue
of an inspired 1978 performance
of the symphony many consider Shostakovich's best by conductor Kurt Sanderling
with the Orchestre national de France. Composed immediately following Stalin's
death and premiered on 17 December 1953, this massive work seems to sum
up the experience of the Soviet people under the dictator's tyranny,
especially in the terrifying Allegro which evokes a machine that grinds
men down, before a more optimistic finale that the composer conceived in
the spirit of Haydn.

Tony
Banks, founder of the rock band Genesis, goes "classical" with this
seven-movement suite, each of them an orchestral sound picture using its
title to set the mood. The result is an extremely well-recorded bag
of ambiant musical noodles that are less frivelous than they might have
been and, in any event, less painful to the ears than listening to
Phil Collins sing.

During
the German occupation of Denmark in World War II, Herman D. Koppel,
who was Jewish, and his family had to flee to Sweden, where they met a
childhood friend of Koppel who had become a baroness. In her house Koppel
could compose in peace and quiet. The Third Symphony is dedicated to her.
Despite his own safe surroundings, Koppel’s experience of the war, and
of the execution of his Polish-Jewish family in German concentration camps,
had a profound impact on his works from this period. These are works
of anguish that explore the depths of the composer's emotions--a final
liberation from the bloodless influence of his teacher Carl Neilsen--and
the birth of major, overlooked 20th century music figure.

One
of many important large-scale fragments left uncompleted by Schoenberg
at his death, the oratorio Jacob's Ladder was finished by Winfried Zillig,
once a student, at the behest of Schoenberg's widow after his death.
Schoenberg wrote the libretto between 1915 and 1917 based on the book of
Genesis, overlaid with elements from Strindberg's drama Jacob Wrestles,
and Balzac's novel Seraphita. He wrote a large of chunk of the music shortly
after but was called to the army and never got around to finishing it.
This is a brilliant, committed performance that captures a little-known
masterpiece by one of the 20th century's greatest composers at the height
of his creative powers.

When
composing his music for Belisa, Poul Rovsing Olsen was deeply inspired
by Spanish poet Federico García Lorca's drama and by the passionate
and demanding character of Belisa herself. The opening scene of the opera
is the wedding night of Belisa and Don Perlimplin, where the young bride
takes 5 lovers in front of her decrepit groom that is sound asleep. The
drama develops from stylized opera buffa into the ambiguous and surreal
with an unexpected ending, and Poul Rovsing Olsen's music reflects Lorca’s
drama like a sensuous kaleidoscope with French and Oriental overtones.

Beth
Anderson's unabashedly romantic "swales" are as pure as a Kentucky mountain
spring, frisky as a new-born colt rolling in bluegrass, and infectious
as a third-grade measles outbreak. They are light, without being
lightweight, and conquer the ear by their deceptively easygoing charm.
If you like Paul Schoenfeld's brand of Americana, you'll like these pieces
a lot.

No
one has done more to champion guitar music by contemporary composers than
the brilliant guitarist and co-founder of Bridge Records, David Starobin.
This CD includes solo and chamber works written between 1992 and 2000
by Gunther Schuller, Michael Starobin, Richard Wernick, Melinda Wagner,
David Liptak, and Paul Lansky--all in premiere recordings. Volume Six also
contains George Crumb's "Mundus Canis"--with the composer performing (and
whispering and yelling) on percussion. To conclude the disc, Elliott Carter's
fantastically inventive sextet, "Luimen" is performed by Speculum Musicae,
New York City's virtuoso new music band.

Rorem
ages well and a recent spate of re-releases of his early chamber and orchestral
works demonstrate that he is a good deal more than simply a master of art
songs. Like most of Rorem's work, 11 Studies is distinctly more European
than American and recall Berio's marvelous Sequenzas.

The
piano concerto is rip-snorting, full-blooded, heavy breathing romantism
of the Rachmaninov variety played with over-the-top virtuosity by the nimble
Peter Donohoe. Listening to it makes you want to invade Russia.

A
collection of 28 organ pieces to be played separately or as a long recital
A music concerned for, as the author writes in the disc notes, "… the importance
of silence in music…". This work is conceived not "for organ" but, really,
for "organ and silence", as the silence is a fundamental part of it, and
it’s not possible to give it up. It’s an attempt, as the author explain
" to permit as much silence as possible, without allowing the music to
actually stop". Tom Johnson is one of the masters of minimalism,
but he combines this with rigorous logic. His work, free from false glitters,
defines, better that any other one, the sense of a research the goes beyond
the strict genre definitions, and become poetic application of original
ideas.